


filament, filament

by Anonymous



Category: Captain America (Movies) RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Ambiguous context, Calming Techniques, Coping, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, Panic Attacks, Seb the Chris Whisperer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-14 22:02:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7192565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Panic is painful.</p><p>Sebastian's touch is what starts to pull him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	filament, filament

**Author's Note:**

> something that came to mind. rhythm of recitation and trusted touch at pressure points are tried & true methods to help ease panic attacks after all.
> 
> poem [here](http://www.bartleby.com/142/208.html).

Touch.

Touch is what starts to pull him back.

Touch hits between the rapid strokes of his hammering pulse, a gong ringing through him and shaking his core as the reverberations set off by each beat drive the next one careening into oblivion. Blood rushing. Head spinning. Wrong directions. 

Wrong _everything_.

Touch, though, is what starts to pull him back.

Fingertips. Fingertips that trace the outline of his face, carefully. Like he’s delicate. Like he’s fragile. Like he’s precious. Like he’s dangerous, or broken, or breaking.

No. No, not the last bit. The fingertips don’t say that. That’s the pounding, the drumbeat, they morse code of his own pulse spewing those truths. That hate. 

The fingertips run across the lines on his forehead, deepened into hills and valleys for the strain on his heart, on his mind. They run the length of each, before skipping from trough to trough, soft and lilting and almost playful, almost beckoning. 

There’s a thread inside him, tied around his ribs, that reaches out, that starts unraveling, and he will unravel with it, he knows that, and he fights it. He fights, because if it unravels, he’ll unravel, and the panic will too, but _he_ will be undone for it. Boneless and shapeless. 

Nothing.

He can’t, but he starts to want to.

The fingertips runs across his hairline, then. Soft, careful breaths of contact in quick succession. Impermanent, but ever-returning. Almost a dream. 

Pressure is placed at his temples. Thumbs on either side, not hard enough to hurt, but close enough to rein his pulse and feel it skitter against an opposing force. Physics. Unrelenting truths of the universe.

His throat feels like it’s closing in upon itself, like the air around him is growing perilously thin. Deserved. He deserves to drown in it, he...

The thumbs are gone, and five points of teasing, pinpoint touch splay downward on his jaw bones, dancing whimsically, somehow, at the same pace as his pulse but with none of the labour in it, none of the ache or the threat to come apart. To surge and fade and fail at the finish.

The fingertips drum against his jaw until the thumbs meet at the tip of his chin.

The fingertips, he realises suddenly, come with sound. Music. They have a voice that’s speaking, and he feels himself rocked by the voice in perfect countermeasure to the raging of his blood and the gasping of his lungs.

“On a little promontory, it stood,” and the fingerprints are curling parentheses around either side of his nose, then tracing the bridge and up, then down along his profile.

“It launched forth filament,” and thumbs outline his lips, ring fingers soft and gentle against the hollows of each eye. “Filament, filament.”

One palm rests open and full on his cheek, as a thumb rests in the dip of his upper lip and presses firm as the other palm strokes down his neck, tries to calm his pulse with constancy and motion.

“Out of itself.”

And panic: panic is painful. Panic is loss and hate and fear and rage and cracking bones beneath its weight. Panic is tears that mean nothing but release that can’t be felt but get caught on waiting lengths of skin, fingers outstretched nonetheless

Promontories. 

Filaments. 

“And you, oh my Soul, where you stand.”

The words don’t falter, the presence and the stillness doesn’t hesitate, but it does reach in its own way, out of itself, into his body. The touch strokes beneath the skin, somehow, and makes him feel helpless, held dear and close as if he’s none of the things his mind worries over. As if his bleeding heart is worth every risk.

“Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space.”

Yes, yes that. But the touch is in him, now. The hand at the side of his neck slides upward, spans his other cheek and resumes the pressure at his philtrum, while the hand on his cheek slips down, and draws lines across the jut of his collarbones. 

Surrounded. Measureless. 

Something is speaking to him, though. Telling him he doesn’t mind being surrounded, if the touch and the voice are what he’s surrounded with. Whispering that whatever thing is seeping into his muscles, his veins, he doesn’t _want_ to ever measure it.

“Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres.”

He feels the breath, now, connected to the voice, as the fingers stroke his clavicles and a benchmark or a guideline. A pattern to follow for his breath, his beating heart.

The touch is sinking deep enough that maybe it could lead him. Maybe the words can lull him back to the here and the now without dragging the anxious skip of his pulse along, too.

“To connect them.” The hands on him press, steady on his chest, on either side through his shirt like the brand of pure fire. A shock to his system. A reset.

His eyes flutter open, without ever realizing they’d been closed. That they’d trusted before anything else.

His eyes flutter open, and he meets a perfect storm before him, the endless sky of generosity, of the birth of life raining down from above. 

“Till the bridge you will need, be formed.” That gaze, those eyes, the touch that holds and bears no space between flesh and flesh alike.

That gaze is a bridge, and its formation. All at once.

“Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere.” The hands on his body trace his limbs to his wrists. Measure his pulse. Thread fingers: gossamer. Filament.

Raise to lips and hold, as if to catch the words that escape on a breath:

“Oh my Soul.”

His lashes catch when he blinks, still wet. His chest hurts when he breathes, still tender.

His fingertips catch on the bottom lip of that mouth, waiting for him.

He blinks. He breathes.

He lets his thumb trace that bottom lip, slow and wanting.

“You with me?” Sebastian murmurs, kissing the pad of Chris’s thumb so soft.

“Yes.” He is. “Yeah, yes.”

Sebastian smiles against his hands. Holds him close. Delicate.

Precious.

Chris breathes and it hurts. Yeah. 

But less.

“I’m with you.”


End file.
